Marjorie Maddox sees things that come from darkness.
I try to avoid reading blurbs before I start reading a poetry collection. And I did that, successfully, with Seeing Things: Poems, the latest collection by Marjorie Maddox. This is a case of realizing I should have read the blurb first, to prepare for what I was about to read.
Maddox tells a story with the 61 poems she’s included in the collection. It’s not a narrative or told like a story. Rather, collectively the poems themselves present a story that is as hard to read as it is too gripping not to. It is a story of three generations of women, a story of depression, abuse, and dementia. If I gave the story a title, it might be “Broken Things, Mending.”
These are not easy poems to read, nor, I suspect, were they easy poems to write. They certainly weren’t easy to experience. And yet Maddox has that gift that pulls you into what she writes, the story she’s telling. You sit there, reading, looking up and away from the words, and then you go back.
Three generations of women: the youngest dealing with depression, the middle dealing with what comes from abuse, and the oldest dealing with loss of memory. And all at one time.
I know what depression is. I’ve never dealt personally with abuse, but I know people who have. And right now, as I read these poems, a face keeps coming to mind, the face of a lifelong friend who has moved beyond the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s to somewhere in the middle – not remembering my name but still feeling safe around me. It’s a cruel disease; it steals your memory, and it steals the shared memories with friends and family.
Alzheimer’s Aubade
She wakes to gray. No words to guide the way
towards son. His unfamiliar face seems kind
enough. She nods hello. Just yesterday
she knew his eyes, but now? This morning’s mind
welcomes the past but not the day. She was
someone: woman who woke at 3:00 a.m. to sing
her restless son to sleep, his calm her cause
for celebration. Today the dawn brings
no clarity, yet still the stranger comes
and draws her curtains wide. She thinks outside
is where she left her life: daughters, a son
who meet sunrise without her. Look, the light
is brighter now. The kind man helps her stand.
To see the morning sun, she takes his hand.
Marjorie Maddox
Hafer is the author of 17 poetry collections, including Nightrider to Edinburgh (1986), Body Parts (1999); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 and republished by Wipf and Stock Publishers); Weeknights at the Cathedral (2006); Local News from Someplace Else (2013); Perpendicular as I (1999 and 2013); True, False, None of the Above (2018); Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (2022), and Begin with a Question (2022). She is the co-author of the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (2005) and author of two children’s books, including Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (2009). Hafer is a professor emerita of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.
The brokenness in life – abuse, depression, and memory loss – is real, and Maddox chronicles it in Seeing Things. But while the poems could have easily become personal laments, laments no one would begrudge, that’s not what she’s written here. As much as it is about brokenness, this collection is also about survival and resilience.
Related:
Marjorie Maddox Hafer: Poetry, Art, and Spelling.
Photo by Adam Selwood, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Poets and Poems: Marjorie Maddox and “Seeing Things” - February 27, 2025
- Religion and Poetry Do Mix – and Mix Well - February 25, 2025
- Poets and Poems: Ryan Ruby and “Context Collapse” - February 20, 2025
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